Mobile computing devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and personal data assistants (PDAs) have become increasingly common tools for both entertainment and business productivity. These devices have seen an increase in their hardware processing power, which has contributed to their ability to execute robust applications while taking advantage of user interface feature set provided by the native operating system of the device. Such applications are generally developed, compiled and packaged in advance, and made available to consumers via an online marketplace such as an app store. Users can select applications for purchase and download to the device.
However, updates to such applications, particularly when dealing with a static user interface, generally require extensive development time due to changing of the application code. This leads to an increase in product costs and delayed time for the updates to become available because the applications are changed, recompiled and repackaged, and the user has to re-download the application. Also, due to the increasing number of devices in the marketplace that run different types of operating systems, the development effort must be duplicated to create separate application code for each device/operating system.